Remember Mixx? It was bought out, and the new owners created Chime.in. They did not use the coding. They did not use the URL. I suppose they had the mailing list. I hope they didn’t pay more than $19.97 for it.

Well, the new owners of Digg at least kept the domain. Digg was (OMG – I am already talking in the past tense!), you might recall, the grand-daddy of social sharing websites.

A search for “site:digg.com” in Google reveals “About 14,100,000 results”. That means 14 million pages are indexed, probably a lot more are out there. And all of them say the same thing:

“404”

Yes, Digg can now be found all on a single page. Gone is the community. Gone are categories. Gone are any hot or upcoming or friends or anything, except what can fit on a single page. In one fell swoop, Digg has imploded. I guess this is what happens when a star goes super nova.

You might be able to recoup your user data by filling in a request at http://digg.com/archive, but to what end? What would you do with the data?

No problem. These days you will find me with a lot of other long-time Diggers “Thruzting” away at Thruzt.com. Feel free to join me there. And if you are Canadian, join me also on Zoomit.ca.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2012 at 11:06 am and is filed under Digg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There has to be more to the story than we are being told regarding these buyouts of social voting sites by new owners who just shut them down. Mixx, Digg, Amplify… It would seem to me that there must be SOME value in all those user accounts, all that content, all that commentary — but for some reason the buyers seem to always and without exception determine that the most valuable use is to just erase it all.

Personally, I think the big player in search is involved somehow in some way or another. Be it setting up shell companies to buy out these wildly popular voting sites only to shut them down as a means of reducing the amount of content it must index or for some other purpose.

Mixx may have been shut down because the culture was not conducive to mass media burying important stories. Once they’d hit the front page of Mixx, ma\\\\

… the AP and all the major newspapers would be obliged to report on stories they’d otherwise never acknowledge in print. Digg never really had that problem, as the front page reflected the same biases as would the front page of the New York times and all the other major players in print.

Amplify… I just don’t know what that one was about. There are others, but it seems as though the invisible hand at work here has an agenda all its own, and it seems to me the primary motive is either to eliminate these sites that put out endless millions of pages of UGC, and/or it’s part of a coordinated effort to remove the ability from regular people to create news, leaving it up to the editors who feel they have a God-given right to determine for everyone what news should be shown to the public and what should be hidden from view.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. Call it conspiratorial if you will. I know not how else to explain the deliberate burning of money.

And I don’t buy that there was no money in those sites. Based on the returns I’ve been seeing from Facebook advertising, I definitely see value in the content and users – for advertising if nothing else, but there’s definitely value there. This is the main reason I cannot accept the stated reasoning for these buyouts for no reason other than to shut down popular sites with millions of users.